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By Andrea Abel
Special to ‘The Jewish Outlook
Five years ago, Eli Winkelman began baking challah during her freshman year at Scripps College, part of the Claremont Colleges system in Claremont, Calif.
“I started making challah for fun – something I’d done a lot with my mom in high school,” said Winkelman, who majored in politics and Jewish studies.
What started as a therapeutic ritual to fill her time and connect to home and her Jewish roots has grown into Challah for Hunger, a national nonprofit whose mission is to raise awareness and funds for disaster relief through baking and selling challahs.
Today, nearly 30 Challah for Hunger chapters exist, mostly on college campuses throughout the United States, among them Brooklyn College, University of California at Los Angeles, University of Oregon, Vassar College and the University of Texas at Austin. This fall the first international chapter began in Australia, as well as the first non-campus-based chapter. All new chapters have formed due to word of mouth.
Each chapter donates a minimum of 50 percent of their profits to humanitarian efforts in Darfur through American Jewish World Service. The remaining profit can be donated to another hunger or similar organization of the chapter’s choice. Many chapters choose a local hunger organization. To date, Challah for Hunger has donated more than $130,000, with nearly $35,000 raised in fall 2009.
 Turning age 25 this month and serving as the organization’s national coordinator, Winkelman relates how her baking endeavors expanded like yeasty dough rising in a warm kitchen into an organization that nourishes on so many levels.
“People came to learn from me,” Winkelman said. “Then they all came back the following weeks claiming that their friends had eaten all their challah.”
She saw demand for a product and an ample supply of willing bakers. But she also realized it would only be worth the effort if it was for a good cause. Her friend Melinda Koster had worked as a summer intern for an organization working on Darfur, among other issues. Winkelman said that, at the time, awareness about the genocide and human rights atrocities in Darfur, a region in Sudan, was little known on campus.
The American Jewish World Service’s Web site describes the dire situation in Darfur: “Since 2003, the government of Sudan and their proxy militia, the Janjaweed, have been conducting a counterinsurgency operation against rebel groups in Darfur.
Their primary strategy is a scorched-earth campaign targeting communities that share the same ethnicity as the rebels. Government forces and Janjaweed continue to terrorize and kill civilians, rape women and girls, burn villages, and drive innocent people from their homes. More than two million people have been displaced and at least 450,000 have lost their lives to this genocidal campaign.”
Winkelman said, “We had a program and we didn’t have a cause for it. She (friend Koster) had a cause and not a program. So we kind of put the pieces together and made Challah for Hunger. At first it was a bake sale where the profits would go to efforts in Darfur. Slowly, we saw that there were a lot of other outcomes.”
Students became empowered in the kitchen and found a connection to their Jewish roots, the Jewish community became invigorated on campus, and students enjoyed eating the challah. The project empowered students on another level as well: to become politically active through tabling efforts to write postcards to elected officials during weekly challah sales.
Here’s the basic structure of how Challah for Hunger works:
An interested group organizes as a campus group, finds an umbrella organization and a commercial kitchen. The amount of time needed to accomplish these steps, Winkelman said, varies from campus to campus. Challah for Hunger handles all finances and gives startup funds to buy the new chapter’s first set of equipment. After that, sale proceeds are used.
Each week a group of volunteers comes in to make dough. Another group might come in to add the flavors and bake the loaves. The national organization encourages use of a basic dough recipe they provide.
“There is a lot of experimentation with flavor and varieties,” Winkelman said. “It’s fun to see the experimentation and the creativity.”
Generally, a chapter will offer a traditional loaf and then a few different sweet or savory flavors, such as chocolate chip, whole wheat, raisin, cinnamon & sugar, and sun-dried tomato basil.
The next day, volunteers set up tables and sell the challah. The table offers educational information on Darfur or the chapter’s other beneficiaries.
“At the sales tables, we encourage our chapters to do education and advocacy, so it’s not just a bake sale,” Winkelman said. “We offer customers a discount in exchange for an act of advocacy. If they take the time to write a postcard or make a phone call to a public official or a media outlet, they can get a discount on their challah. At the University of Texas they were writing to the president of the UT System for the system to divest.
“Getting people to write their first letter is a big threshold. Once you get someone to write a letter, they’re more likely to write another. They are more likely to care about the cause because they’ve invested themselves enough to write about it. That’s a really important aspect of what we do is the sales table education.”
Eli’s challah-making tip?
“When you are adding a flavor ingredient,” Winkelman offered, “remember that the challah dough when it bakes will double in size but the flavor ingredient will not. If you are making chocolate chip challah, you want chocolate chip challah. You don’t want a chocolate chip here and there. You have to be twice as generous as you think with those flavor ingredients.”
What started as a fun outlet for Winkelman now not only offers delicious challah for students craving home-baked bread, she said.
“There are lots of other outcomes,” she said. “There’s community building, Jewish identity, philanthropy training, kitchen empowerment. We also want to provide opportunities for the chapters and the volunteers to find all of these other potential outcomes.”
As the organization grows, Winkelman added, “we are doing a lot to connect the chapters with each other and have them support each other and share. We’re trying to have regional meet-ups and national gatherings, want chapters to further potential outcomes.”
To further empower volunteers and further their interests, Winkelman wants to host a series of webinars to sharpen their skills and knowledge on such subjects as aid and development, business and leadership and nonprofits, or marketing.
When asked if she has a favorite challah, Winkelman replied, “Can I say my favorite is still my mom’s?”
A connection to home and Jewish roots; a chance to learn baking skills, make friends, and socialize; an opportunity to become politically empowered through advocacy; a mitzvah of donating to end genocide in Darfur — all kneaded into one tasty loaf of challah. Not bad. Not bad at all.
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Andrea Abel is a regular contributor to The Jewish Outlook. Contact her at
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